The theme is called Thesis and is the first professional theme I’ve purchased.

Don’t tell me if you don’t like it.

Some of the regular features have been moved around, and I’ve given up on the dark red #a90000 which is still my favorite color on the web.

I’m still working on the tagline: An online community of Christ-centered learning, featuring the bloggers of Southern Seminary, but open to everyone

You can give me feedback on that. I wanted to launch this new design in June, but if turned out much easier than I thought. All those hours playing mad scientist with php has really made theme customizing a snap.

I think this a great step towards becoming an extremely legitimate blog site. If you are going to keep moving things around, you may want to say something about everything being moved around as you try to figure out which format works best.

I hope to keep the sidebars consistent. I’ve wanted to simplify them for sometime, and even have been cutting out clutter over the last few months. It’s just lazy design for me to keep dumping features in the sidebar. The “other pages” heading consolidates much of it.

Thanks for the positive comments. The banner is a random rotation of 5 images, I can add more in the future. I think that adds a little visual element to what is primarily a word driven website.

(Since I told you I really dig it … One tip: maybe give it a little ‘color’ by utilizing some CSS shading in the active links (when hovering) of menu bar up top, rather than only underlined text.) The Red on the old site was distinguishing, for it seems that not many people can do red well for whatever reason, but you did. Keep blogging!

‘Tis the season of blog upgrades I guess. I just did a little change on mine too.

I just want to be the sour apple in the batch and wine some more about the absence of the “Well Said” sidebar again. It sure was helpful to come in on the main page and already see the hot posts for the SBTS community. Boy was that helpful… 😉

Have you considered having an SBTS forum through SAS? Com’on! It’d be fun!

Hank – I’ll work on the Well Said. The main problem I was having is that I’m giving out too many “well said” tags so even showing the most recent five leaves out the other 10 from that same day. Let me think about it some…

Jeff – I messed with some of my old red but it didn’t seem to mesh well unless I began to modify colors all around. I think you’re right about the nav menu, adding a better hover effect will help. I’m hoping Chris P. will give us some better support for the paid theme.